<p align="left">"Perfection is not the basis of what I'm talking about," says a member of the Cassandra family, which forms the center of Denis Johnson's plays, <i>Hellhound on My Trail</i> and <i>Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames</i>.The character could be speaking for his creator, because human imperfection is one of Denis Johnson's specialties -- in his critically acclaimed novels, short stories, and nonfiction, and, now, in two brilliant new plays. </p><p align="left">These two works present a dramatized field guide to some of the more dysfunctional and dysphoric inhabitants of the American West: a sexual-misconduct investigator who misconducts herself sexually; a renegade Jehovah's Witness who supports his splinter Jehovean group by dealing drugs; the Cassandra Brothers and their father and their grandmother, thrown together at a family reunion/wedding/melee at their shabby homestead in Ukiah, California.</p><p align="left">When <i>Shoppers Carried by Escalators</i> Into the Flames was performed in San Francisco in 2001, the <i>Chronicle</i> said, <i>There's an enormous appeal in Johnson's bleak-comic vision of a semi-mythic American West</i>. That appeal derives from the author's perfect vision of imperfection, embodied with such energy and courage in these marvelous pieces of theatre.</p>